More about the construction of the Lii character set
Day thirty-six -- more about the construction of the Lii character set. Question -- from "sangi39" -- ... until both your physics, your "etymology" of Chinese characters* and your work on PreBabel is tested and supported by positive historical evidence to show the hypothesized character construction, I think the best we can do right now is agree to disagree and leave the argument until the results and support come through. Answer -- Of course, you have the right to disagree anything of your choosing. It took over 10 billion US dollars to build the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and over one billion dollars to run it. So, my physics has to wait. To test the "claim 1" of Chinese Etymology (CE), it can be done with any 10 year old kid. I do not know what you are waiting for. Simply go and get one page the current Chinese newspaper and ask a 10 year old American kid who knows not a single Chinese word to check out "each" Chinese word on that page with the 220 (+ 50 variants) word roots to see whether he can dissect those words with the set. Just simple like that. Question -- "sangi39" -- However, if one of the component characters consistently occurs in characters of similar reconstructed pronunciations and that phonetic component has a similar pronunciation as the individual character itself, then it could be suggested the process continued under the rule of the First Emperor. Answer -- I do not understand this statement. The roots in the CE root word set consistently appear in the Big 5 set (traditional Chinese character set). In Lesson 2 of "Chinese Etymology", the roles of phonetics and the relation between the phonetics and the characters are described in details. The "reconstructed pronunciations and whatnot" are your stuff which I do not have any idea about them and would not be able to comment on them. At the time of the First Emperor, there were three events happened about the same time, from 220 B.C. to 210 B.C.. + Event 1: the standardization of the Small Seal set by the Prime Minister Li. + Event 2: the construction of the Lii character set (the Wang - Chang set). + Event 3: a few years after the debut of the Lii set, the Small Seal set went extinct, not a living language any more. It survives to today as an art, not as a living language. So, What process are you talking about? Question -- from "sangi39" -- That is, various linguistic studies including phonological reconstruction and oracle bone research has shown 90% of Chinese characters were created using phonetic character borrowing and later disambiguity using semantic clues. Such research rarely indicates any mysterious semantic build up of characters from a limited 220 root characters, especially since such a number is exceeding in the oracle bone script. Answer -- Not "rarely", but never. They never did. They simply did not know. Yet, that mystery is not hard to be checked out one word at a time, as the 220 root set is now available. Question -- from "sangi39" -- It is the apparent continuity in Chinese character formulation which appears in both of their works which forms the basis of my ideas and leads me to disfavor yours. Answer -- Thanks for providing the links on Pulleyblank's "Middle Chinese: a study in historical phonology" and Baxter's "A Handbook of Old Chinese". I did not read their works; so I cannot comment on them. Yet, the "Chinese Etymology" is 100% successful on dissecting and decoding all characters of Big 5 set while without knowing their work. Question -- from "sangi39" -- This "universal" language may better be termed "a new approach to learning Chinese characters in light of lost links between phonology and semantics with modern Chinese characters and the various Chinese languages" rather than "an etymology of Chinese characters" or "a universal language". Answer -- In PreBabel (Chinese), there is no "lost links between phonology and semantics with modern Chinese characters". + Lesson 1: root word set, dissection and decoding + Lesson 2: phonetics on dissection and decoding + Lesson 3: advanced topics Workbook: lists over 8,000 Chinese characters according to the roots, the dissection and the decoding. Of course, there is "lost links between phonology and semantics with modern Chinese characters" for them. Otherwise, they will be the one to write those lessons. Question -- from "sangi39" -- ... This character break-down may have promise in the teaching of Chinese characters, ... ... I would accept this as a new method of teaching Chinese characters specifically. Answer -- Thanks for these comments. The claim 2 of PreBabel (Chinese) is that everyone (10 year old or older) can learn Chinese written language with only 300 hours of good study. If someone tried it at the beginning of this thread, he has learned a new language already. Question -- from "SLiV" -- ... about conlanging. ... It is a good way to educate and enjoy oneself, and explore the depth of linguistics. Answer -- How so true this is, indeed. Now, we know that the Big 5 set is, in fact, a constructed language, perhaps, the first one in the world. It might be worth a while for us conlangers to see the constructing principle of this ancient conlang which became a living natural language. Signature -- PreBabel is the true universal language, it is available at http://www.prebabel.info